As is known in the art, electronics packages typically require heat dissipation for integrated circuits, which can generate significant amounts of heat. A wide range of mechanisms for dissipating heat are well known, such as fans, heat fins, liquid cold plates, heat pipes, and the like. As advances in microelectronics occur, devices generate ever more heat, and as a result, more efficient cooling solutions are required.
One mechanism for the efficient transportation of heat away from high-dissipation electronics packages is a closed, two-phase heat pipe or vapor chamber system. Prior attempts to employ vapor chamber heat spreaders for cooling high heat flux electronics suffer from a fundamental tradeoff between mass transport within and thermal resistance of the wick. Thick wicks allow sufficient liquid transport to the heated area, but also increase the thermal resistance associated with the evaporator. Many configurations have been used in an attempt to address this limitation via fluid delivery from above or below the wick with arteries, or bi-porous “clumps” of material with smaller features; neither are ideal for thickness-constrained heat spreaders cooling high heat flux devices. The former solution increases the conduction resistance associated with transporting heat to the liquid-vapor interface, while the latter reduces the available vapor transport space for a given heat spreader thickness, which in turn limits total heat transport capability.